Joe Rogan was Never the Joe Rogan of the Left
People responded to a dumb talking point with another dumb talking point
(Chapter Headings: Introduction)
Hello and welcome to the thirtieth instalment of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. The topic, why Joe Rogan was never the Joe Rogan of the Left.
(Chapter Headings: Joe Rogan)
I’ve brought up Rogan a few times before. In September, I wrote a piece ( linked here) analysing my own definition of the phrase Far Left. In it, I wrote
“The fact that Chomsky and his ilk denounce left-leaning people does not make the latter Far Left. If it did, then people like Joe Rogan and Dr. Sam Harris would have to be Far Left because of how frequently left-wingers (like Ezra Klein and Rebecca Lewis) denounce them. That would make absolutely no sense whatsoever given that a major reason for left-wing criticism of Dr. Harris is that he speaks out against the excesses of the Left.”
I wrote that piece as an addendum to my thirteenth Matitya’s Musing (linked here) rather than as a Matitya’s Musing of its own. I have also referenced Rogan elsewhere on Medium. In my 27th Musing (linked here), I said
“In an interview with Joe Rogan, [Jordan] Peterson denounced [Jacques] Derrida as “the central villain”. And, in a speech at the Preston Manning Centre, Peterson called Derrida the “head trickster for the postmodernist movement.” Peterson, basing himself on the Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks, posits that Deconstruction is an outgrowth of Marxism.”
Most recently, in Criticising “Criticism of Israel” , I wrote
“This, again, raises the question “what do you do?” When Joe Rogan asked Bari Weiss exactly that question, she responded “I don’t know.” Sadly, “I don’t know” is the right answer. That’s also why I don’t tend to regard the claim that the Israeli presence in the West Bank is bad as a legitimate criticism of Israel, even when it’s offered by people like [Alan] Dershowitz or Noa Tishby.”
Reading through these examples, I find information about Rogan’s guests but not really about Rogan. That doesn’t surprise me. I’m more interested in the guests than in the host.
(Chapter Headings: The AIN)
Rogan’s guests are among the most popular figures of the Internet in the world today. Some call them, the Alternative Influence Network.(To read a good, albeit lenghty, analysis of the AIN, click here.) Simply put, politically themed YouTube is dominated by the Right (and anti-woke Left) and quite a lot of right-wing (and anti-woke) content creators interview one another about their views (which is why they qualify as a “network). In 2018, the left-wing political commentator Rebecca Lewis wrote a piece arguing that YouTube should censor the AIN to keep it from radicalising people to the Far Right. AIN creators like Destiny, Tim Pool and Ben Shapiro all strongly objected to this suggestion.
(Chapter Headings: The podcast election)
Six years later, then former president Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, winning 31 of the 50 states. The last time a presidential candidate won by that margin was when Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996. (Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying things.) Understandably, anti-Trump commentators, like Sam Harris, wanted an explanation for how this happened so that the Democrats could avoid making the same mistakes next time. The AIN provided Harris with such an explanation. ( Yes. I know Harris is part of the AIN). After all, Shapiro and other right-wingers credited Trump’s victory to the AIN to the point of proudly nicknaming the 2024 presidential race “the podcast election.”
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(Chapter Headings: Can the Left create its own Rogan?)
Just as the Right credits the AIN for Trump’s victory, the Left blames it for the same. This elicited the suggestion that Leftists should create their own Rogan equivalent. The idea that Democrats can create their own Rogan is not a possibility that I seriously entertain. Rogan became famous as a comedian, sports commentator and reality show host thus amassing enough of a fan-base that he could turn his conversations into a podcast. The Joe Rogan Experience became widely viewed and successful well before interviewing the likes of Gary Johnson and Jordan Peterson. Likewise, Dave Rubin and Steven Crowder were comedians before they shifted to political commentary. Dr. Bret Weinstein became an AIN star in large part because existing members sought to provide him with a platform after he was cancelled. Shapiro is the major exception considering that he was a political commentator since he was seventeen. That said, Shapiro wrote opinion pieces for newspapers and magazines, authored books, and appeared on talk radio before beginning to use the Internet as the mechanism with which to spread his message. He was a traditional pundit in a way that most AIN figures aren’t. One might object that the Left needs its own Shapiro but Shapiro and his ilk emerged in reaction to left-wing bias in traditional media. To quote Jonah Goldberg, who is, technically, part of the AIN,
“When Republicans captured Congress in 1994, Democrats convinced themselves it was because Republicans had talk radio on their side. We just need our Rush Limbaugh! So progressives poured money into Air America, which was a bust. With the rise of Fox News, they convinced themselves they needed their own cable network (because apparently MSNBC, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, PBS, plus the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News, etc. didn’t count). So Al Gore launched Current TV. For a while progressives thought that conservative think tanks gave the right a structural advantage, so they created the Center for American Progress (missing the fact that conservative think tanks were created at least in part because vastly better-funded universities had become inhospitable to conservatives).” (Full article linked here)
Goldberg is right.
(Chapter Headings: BreadTube)
There is a possible objection to what I just said. What about BreadTube? To elaborate, there’s a cottage industry of online personalities whose channels are devoted to debunking right-wing (and anti-woke) content. Thanks to Reddit, that community is nicknamed BreadTube. (Named for The Conquest of Bread, a political manifesto by the militant Anarcho-Communist Peter Kropotkin.) A BreadTuber named Hasan Piker has over one million subscribers and over 600 million views. If BreadTubers can succeed, why can’t the Democrats create their own Rogan? Firstly, Piker supported Bernie Sanders, who is registered as an Independent, in 2016 and 2020. In 2024, Piker implied he would withhold his vote from Joe Biden to punish him for not being anti-Israel. Secondly, Piker reinforces Goldberg’s point. Piker started out working for Cenk Uygur’s The Young Turks. Some AIN members, such as Rubin and Crowder, emerged in reaction to the Leftist political commentary that TYT offered. As for the rest of BreadTube, Destiny and Vaush amassed their audiences by live-streaming themselves playing video games before re-branding themselves as political commentators. Lindsay Ellis made videos riffing on Disney Princess-style movies (as The Nostalgia Chick) and then started making video essays about film criticism and expanded from that into broader cultural commentary from a left-wing perspective. Hbomberguy’s channel consists not only of responses to the AIN but of video essays reviewing movies, television shows and video games. BreadTubers, generally speaking, become successful through content discussing topics outside of politics and then move in a political direction. The result is that it doesn’t make sense to create a “Rogan of the Left” because any such individual would need to establish a persona and brand independently of their politics to develop a consumer base. When one’s goal is explicitly to lead people to the Left the way Rogan leads people to the Right, one’s chances of managing that first step are minimal.
(Chapter Headings: Was Rogan the Rogan of the Left?)
I’m not the first to make this observation. That said, others often accompany it with a claim with which I disagree. They say that Rogan was the Rogan of the Left. For example, Goldberg has said “ One argument we heard a lot after the election was this idea that Democrats just need their own Joe Rogan. Never mind that Democrats had Joe Rogan until they effectively chased him away.” Likewise, Rich Lowry posits
“ If the Left did manage to create a progressive Joe Rogan in a lab, as soon as he said something controversial out in the wild, he’d be [anathematised] and subject to cancellation. This is exactly what happened to Joe Rogan. Before he was a Trump bro, he was a Bernie bro. He is socially liberal, has mocked religion, and is in no way a traditional Republican. But the Left turned on him with a vengeance because he expressed controversial views on Covid and had a rogue virologist on his show.”
The anti-woke online personality ShoeOnHead opines “The Left had a Joe Rogan. His name is Joe Rogan”. Jordan Peterson expressed a similar view, wryly noting that supporting Sanders is hardly a right-wing thing to do. My issue is that Peterson and the others buy into the idea that Rogan was once the Rogan of the Left. He wasn’t.
(Chapter Headings: Voting isn’t a window to the soul)
That Rogan supported Sanders in 2020 is an interesting snapshot into his politics but it is just that. A snapshot. It doesn’t tell us all of Rogan’s politics. To quote Goldberg, “The idea that voting is a window into someone’s soul strikes me as almost a theological heresy and a failure of empathetic imagination. It assumes that the person who voted wrong or right sees the world the same way you do and that they invest the same moral, philosophical, and political significance in their vote that you do in yours.” For instance, the British novelist Joanne Rowling endorsed the Communist Party, despite not being a Communist, because the British Communist Party platform agreed with her position on Gender Ideology. (The very next day, the Communist Party recanted that position. I won’t fixate on the moral hypocrisy of supporting Vladimir Lenin while regarding Rowling as beyond the pale.) My point is that it makes sense to pay attention to someone’s reasoning for voting a certain way. Otherwise, Rogan voting for a former Republican Governor of New Mexico cum Libertarian presidential candidate in 2016 should qualify Rogan as right-wing. Voting for Gary Johnson is hardly a left-wing thing to do. But when one remembers that Rogan voted for Johnson because Johnson agreed to be interviewed on Rogan’s show, one realises that it’s not fair to use Rogan voting that way to classify him as a member of the libertarian Right. Rogan said, in 2019 that Sanders “made a ton of sense to me and I would 100 % vote for him. Tulsi Gabbard is my favourite” Rogan’s reasoning was that “the only things that I disagree with about left-wing people [are] support for the military, support for the police and the Second Amendment…. Everything else, across the board, I lean way left”. That sounds like we have reason to regard Rogan as on the Left until we remember that his favourite, Tulsi Gabbard, is now a card-carrying Republican who works for President Trump. Moreover, Sanders was (and is) registered as an Independent such that Rogan liking him never translated into him carrying water for the Democrats. (I alluded to this earlier when discussing Hasan Piker refusing to support the Democratic Party due to him not regarding Democrats as left-wing enough.) Sanders usually votes with the Democrats and was a major contender for their presidential nomination, twice, such that I don’t have a problem with regarding Sanders as if he were a Democrat. That said, Sanders failed to secure the candidacy and Rogan never ended up voting for Sanders’ rival come the general election. I already mentioned Johnson but Rogan also voted for the Libertarian Party in 2020. Rogan endorsed Sanders in the primaries, because he admired his lifetime of ideological consistency, but Rogan said he would sooner vote for Trump than for Biden. Even so, Rogan ultimately voted for Jo Jorgensen (the Libertarian candidate). Rogan’s reasoning was that Jorgensen supported drug legalisation. In 2024, Rogan, functionally, endorsed the Democrat cum anti-woke independent Robert Kennedy as “the only one who makes sense”. Though Rogan later qualified that he was also impressed by Trump’s response to attempted assassination and that Dave Smith was a better source of political commentary than Rogan himself was. (Incidentally, Smith endorsed Trump.) Since then, Kennedy dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. Then, after interviewing Elon Musk, Rogan endorsed Trump. An endorsement that came as a surprise to absolutely no one considering Rogan’s praise of Ron DeSantis and other Republicans, his outspoken opposition to wokeness, and his having shifted to the Right on several issues. The last Democrat for whom Rogan voted in a general election, at least at the presidential level, was (probably) Barack Obama in 2012. (I say “probably” because Rogan, to my knowledge, hasn’t specified for whom he voted in 2012 but Rogan has expressed a favourable opinion of Obama which leads me to suspect that Rogan voted for him.)
(Chapter Headings: Red Pilling)
Nowadays, the Right often describes shifting politically rightward as getting “red pilled”. It’s a reference to the movie The Matrix. In the film, Morpheus (not the Greek god but a character named for him) gives Tom Anderson a red pill so that Anderson (also known as Neo) can free his mind from the control of superintelligent machines and see the dystopian world in which he lives as it truly is. Rogan and the AIN are often described as “red pilling” their audience. Rogan, at no point, engaged in the equivalent of “red pilling” on behalf of Obama and the Left.
(Chapter Headings: Final Thoughts)
The observation that Rogan was on the Left, once upon a time, is true. Even so, it’s not a good response to the (admittedly dumb) talking point that the Left needs its own Rogan. What they want is someone who plays the same function on behalf of the Left that Rogan’s “red pilling” does for the Right. Rogan at no point fulfilled that role. Joe Rogan was never the Joe Rogan of the Left.
